April 18, 2005
UPFRONT
US child sex criminals getting away with it
By Paul Zach
Straits Times US Bureau

CLEVELAND (OHIO) - LITTLE Jessica Lunsford was a picture of happy innocence.

A photograph of the nine-year-old smiling under a fuzzy pink hat was broadcast repeatedly on TV across the United States after she disappeared from her bed one night in late February.

All the publicity raised hopes that Jessica would quickly be found. But as the days passed, the optimism turned to dread.

Singaporeans experienced the same feelings last year after seeing pictures of Huang Na, the
eight-year-old from China who disappeared. Hope turned to horror when her tiny body was found crammed into a cardboard box at Telok Blangah Hill Park.

Police here in the US dug up Jessica's body too, behind a neighbour's house just 150m from her bedroom in Homossasa, Florida.

Not only is she believed to have been sexually assaulted, but she may have been buried alive, CNN and Fox News said.

Such crimes against children happen all too often in the US.

Last week, 13-year-old Sarah Lunde was reported missing from home, not far from where Jessica disappeared. Police say a body found in a pond at an abandoned fishing camp on Saturday is almost certainly hers.

Each week the National Centre For Missing & Exploited Children sends cards bearing photos of children who have vanished to 79 million homes across the country each week.

It reports that in 1999, the latest year studied, 58,200 children were abducted by non-family members. It also said that one in five girls and one in 10 boys in this country are exploited sexually, and less than 35 per cent of those assaults are reported.

Another study reported by the centre revealed that about 100 children who go missing are found dead each year.

In fact, as Florida police were digging up Jessica's body, 10-year-old Jetseta Gage was kidnapped from her home in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Her body was found the next day in a mobile home.

In Massillon, Ohio, a predator has tried to abduct nine children since February.

In one case, the man pulled his car into a driveway where a six-year-old boy was playing alone and held out a bag of sweets. The boy's father came to the rescue, but the man sped away.

In the same city in the 1980s, two little girls were raped and murdered. In one of those cases, a neighbour was sentenced to death for killing seven-year-old Marie Hendershot. But the Governor of Ohio commuted the sentence to life in prison.

And there's the rub.

Few would disagree with the view that the American penal and legal system is increasingly weighted in favour of criminals at the expense of victims, even when they are children.

Court rulings have made it difficult for prosecutors to win convictions, and even those who are convicted are soon on the streets again.

Investigators say a convicted sex offender, John Evander Couey, 46, has confessed to abducting and killing Jessica.

The drifter had already been arrested 24 times, including on a 1991 charge of fondling a child.

He had absconded more than once and, at the time of Jessica's disappearance, was wanted for a parole violation.

Jetseta's body was found in a mobile home with Roger Bentley, 37, police said, and he has been charged with her murder. He had already served two years in prison for abusing another child.

In the case of Sarah's disappearance, police are interviewing yet another sex offender - one of 24 who lived in her neighbourhood.

Jessica's father Mark, and Roy Brown, whose 7-year-old daughter, Amanda, was killed by a convicted child molester in 1997, had both joined the search for Sarah.

It took an earlier case involving a little girl before many Americans were even allowed to know that such sex offenders roamed freely in their midst.

In 1995, Megan Kanka, a seven-year-old New Jersey girl, was raped and murdered by a convicted child molester who lived across the street.

Her parents did not know he was there: nothing in the law protected Megan, but a law shielded the murderer, preventing police from releasing sex-offender information on him.

A public outcry led to Megan's Law. It now allows public access to such information, including on the Internet.

Just a year later, however, nine-year-old Amber Hagerman was riding her bike near her home in Arlington, Texas, singing America The Beautiful, when a man in a truck snatched her.

Four days later, her body was found in a ditch, her throat cut.

Concerned citizens again responded, helping set up the Amber Alert, in which Americans nationwide are informed over TV and radio whenever a child is abducted.

The system has helped recover 198 children since it was established, according to Mr Jim Libonati of the National Centre For Missing & Exploited Children.

Still, neither effort saved Jessica or Jetseta, and many Americans are now taking a harder look at their legal system.

An alert on the Congress.org website noted that while Jessica and Jetseta were being murdered, most politicians were focused on the case of the court-ordered removal of a feeding tube from the brain-damaged Mrs Terri Schiavo.

It pointed out that, unlike in the Schiavo case, there had been no special legislative sessions or emergency convening of Congress or state politicians for either girl. It urged Congress: 'Please strongly consider immediately discussing legislation that will allow for stricter sentencing guidelines, and monitoring of sexual offenders.'

Congressman Ginny Brown-Waite presented a proposal last week for new federal sex offender legislation named for yet another victim, the Jessica Lunsford Act. Yet what's still not getting enough attention is making sure that justice is done right from the start.

That was highlighted recently here in Cleveland.

Despite considerable evidence against him, a jury acquitted Mr Daniel Hines, 26, of the rape, murder and dismemberment of 11-year-old Shakira Johnson.

After three days of deliberations the jury asked the judge for a definition of 'reasonable doubt' - American juries are told by courts they cannot convict a person if they have such a doubt.

Last month, he was put on trial again, this time for trying to rape his 13-year-old cousin. The court heard that when her brother and a friend, Marine Private Brandon Sloan, tried to stop him, he attacked them.

Pte Sloan confirmed all that in court. But after 12 hours of deliberations, the judge declared a hung jury.

Mr Hines was cleared again.